A number of different storage management applications are currently available for use in monitoring, managing, and optimizing storage systems. In particular, many of these applications provide and monitor various performance statistics of one or more storage systems. An administrator of the storage systems can use such performance statistics to manage and optimize the storage systems.
To gather such performance statistics, many conventional storage management applications are programmed to periodically poll each storage system for data and store the data in one or more files. However, these applications typically collect more data than is actually used. For example, an administrator may be interested in the performance statistics associated with a capacity of a storage server over a period of time. However, in addition to collecting such capacity data, many other types of data irrelevant to the capacity are also collected, such as processor hit rates, network bandwidth, and other non-relevant information.
The collection of such a large amount of data places a heavy load on the storage systems because, in one example, communication of such data requires a large amount of network bandwidth and processing power. Thus, the collection of such a large amount of data may negatively affect performances of the storage systems. Additionally, a large amount of data storage capacity is required to store the collected data, and such capacity might not be readily available.